Last week ago I did a photo shoot of two gorgeous little sisters in the dunes. They cooperated very well. It was a pleasure to work with them. The parents are happy with the result.
TECH-INFO: it was pretty foggy, which was perfect for my lighting. You could just see a little part of the sun that gave some direction to the light. If you look good you'll see that the sun was behind me at the left. It's important to place the sun more or less in front of the subject, otherwise you get too dark faces and blown out backgrounds despites the cloudy or foggy weather conditions. During the shoot I used many times a snooted speedlight flash which I placed at the right behind the girls. The father was my voice activated light stand. Such flash nicely highlights the hair. I think I didn't use it in that image but I'm not sure anymore. I also experimented with pointing the speedlight directly into the faces, from a certain angle, which gives that little extra. The fog acted as a super huge softbox which was great to light the dresses. Any harder kind of light yields easily blown out areas on such white and bright clothing. At the same time the fog formed my background too. My lens was a 70-300mm, which provides excellent sharpness between 70 and 200mm. The 18-200mm lens is great but really lacks some of the sharpness which I sometimes hate. First I did some test shots to get an optimal exposure. All pictures were shot in JPG + RAW. The latter is only for backup in case I would get clipped high lights. A JPG was more than fine enough, especially if it's already good in camera then only minor enhancements must be done.
During post processing I first used DxO Optics Pro for lens corrections (which were minimal) and DxO lighting to enhance local contrast. It's comparable with D-lighting. To soften the faces even more I used Portraiture. This software makes in Photoshop a new layer which I mixed with the original image to prevent softening of the clothes, sand and grass. Afterwards I slightly brightened the faces too using a masked adjustment brightness layer. Finally I added vignetting: the corners on the bottom are darker than the ones on the top.
It's lots of work but I may say that the result is very fine. For now I would not now how to do it much better. Perhaps in the future I will. But now, I'm very happy with this image.
Two Princesses in the Dunes
Last week ago I did a photo shoot of two gorgeous little sisters in the dunes. They cooperated very well. It was a pleasure to work with them. The parents are happy with the result.
TECH-INFO: it was pretty foggy, which was perfect for my lighting. You could just see a little part of the sun that gave some direction to the light. If you look good you'll see that the sun was behind me at the left. It's important to place the sun more or less in front of the subject, otherwise you get too dark faces and blown out backgrounds despites the cloudy or foggy weather conditions. During the shoot I used many times a snooted speedlight flash which I placed at the right behind the girls. The father was my voice activated light stand. Such flash nicely highlights the hair. I think I didn't use it in that image but I'm not sure anymore. I also experimented with pointing the speedlight directly into the faces, from a certain angle, which gives that little extra. The fog acted as a super huge softbox which was great to light the dresses. Any harder kind of light yields easily blown out areas on such white and bright clothing. At the same time the fog formed my background too. My lens was a 70-300mm, which provides excellent sharpness between 70 and 200mm. The 18-200mm lens is great but really lacks some of the sharpness which I sometimes hate. First I did some test shots to get an optimal exposure. All pictures were shot in JPG + RAW. The latter is only for backup in case I would get clipped high lights. A JPG was more than fine enough, especially if it's already good in camera then only minor enhancements must be done.
During post processing I first used DxO Optics Pro for lens corrections (which were minimal) and DxO lighting to enhance local contrast. It's comparable with D-lighting. To soften the faces even more I used Portraiture. This software makes in Photoshop a new layer which I mixed with the original image to prevent softening of the clothes, sand and grass. Afterwards I slightly brightened the faces too using a masked adjustment brightness layer. Finally I added vignetting: the corners on the bottom are darker than the ones on the top.
It's lots of work but I may say that the result is very fine. For now I would not now how to do it much better. Perhaps in the future I will. But now, I'm very happy with this image.
The light is absolutely amazing and so perfect... Great job Paul. Your models are really photogenic.
LightningPaul: Thanks! I'm was extremely happy with the fog. I like cloudy and foggy weather more and more when taking portraits outside. The models were awesome. They take after every shutter click an entirely new pose. It was a joy.
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